The global smartphone market is seeing slowing growth in the first half of 2017. Searching for ways to stimulate consumer demand, smartphone brands have put considerable efforts in improving displays of their devices. WitsView, a division of TrendForce, reports that increasing screen to body ratio and narrow bezel are two major trends in smartphone design for this year and are expected to drive changes in specifications of smartphone panels. Specifically, the display’s aspect ratio is moving from the mainstream 16:9 to 18:9 (2:1), which is also known as the full screen format. WitsView estimates that around 10% of smartphones shipped worldwide in 2017 will have displays with 18:9 or higher aspect ratios.
Taiwan’s major annual optoelectronics industry exhibition, Photonics Festival 2017, will be held in Nangang Exhibition Hall of Taipei World Trade Center from June 14 to 16. Some of the highlights in the LED section of this exhibition includes products for the automotive industry and applications related to ultraviolet (UV) LEDs. LEDinside, a division of TrendForce, projects that the scale of the global UV LED market will increase from US$288 million in 2017 to US$526 million in 2020. Furthermore, the CAGR of the UV LED market in the 2015~2020 period is currently estimated at 34%. These and other data can be found in LEDinside’s 2017 UV LED vs. UV LED Module Market Report.
TrendForce’s latest research on the automotive electronics market finds that government policies worldwide to reduce carbon emissions have facilitated faster adoption of ICT-based solutions within the automotive industry. According to TrendForce’s analysis, the global average value of analog ICs and power transistors for power management will come to US$209 per vehicle in 2017, an increase of 11% from US$188 in 2016. Furthermore, the automotive industry is projected to account for 23% of the total worldwide demand for power transistors this year. Automotive has become the second largest application for power transistors, while the industrial application is the leading source of market demand for the product.